Waiting Room

Mother walked through the door to the other side, into the gaping mouth of the oncology wing. It sang persistent high pitched sterile notes. I waited for a long time in a tastefully boring room with padded hardback chairs, outdated magazines, and the television set on mute. Get comfortable, the room seemed to say. But not too comfortable.

I already knew Brad and Angie’s wedding plans. QVC featured yet another garish piece of jewelry. The Butterfly Eternity Pin. Now you can grace your knitting circle in style, decked out in geriatric bling. Speaking of geriatrics, I was surrounded by exactly the kind of old people who bought expensive QVC jewelry. A woman, perhaps in her seventies- slim, spritely, and oh so talkative- flashed her gleaming teeth around the room. I understood of course. People like her, people who wore slacks and cardigans even in the summer, did not worry about whether or not they can afford expensive anesthesia. They do not have to decide between two sick family members. Which one can we afford? Which disease is a bigger emergency?

There were more of them. All matching the beige room. So very taupe. I wondered if the kind of success these people possessed in their old age had numbed them to universally human understanding of suffering. They scattered about the room. Some nodded grimly to one another. Others congregated and gossiped in knowing whispers. A wave of morbid camaraderie permeated the area and suddenly it wasn’t quiet or somber at all. A fat orderly wheeled some shriveled man out into the room. He clutched a plastic cup full of apple juice, probably, and raised it to the room. L’chaim! To life!

I waited for a long time.

The Biographer

She’s hungry. Her hands shake, but the movement of her body is graceful, fluid, studied. Her breath is ragged; yet her eyes close, and she completes the dance. Vacant sounds accompany the opiate ballerina- faraway waves crashing against the rocky beach, the electric denouement of bars freckling the streets, a revving of a motorcycle in C major.

First the allegro. The hunger clawing at her skin begs to be satiated. The desperation. Elevé, glissade, jètè, kick-ball-change. She unbuttons her jeans and leans against the wall spread eagle. Her underwear, so pretty. So pink. A curl of strawberry blond peaks out, softly billowing in the night breeze. The inside of her thigh is bruised, the flesh a palate of twilight colors. Dark reds, purples, blues, faded violets.  She is a work of accidental art, sprayed watercolor on a canvas, a masterful sketch. A superior first draft of a tragic poem lost in the scrap pile, written absentmindedly on an envelope or between the lines of a grocery list. One loved only by scholars and fanatics.

She is hungry. She slaps her thigh and holds the tool of her salvation steady, steady, steady…then the piqué and the immediate reward. The tautness of her dancing shoulders is released with a thrum of violin strings. The movement of her anesthetized limbs is almost sensual. Arousing. Her head rolls back and the syringe out of her hand.

While she still quivers with pleasure, I move. Out of the shadows. If she sees me, she doesn’t show it. If she sees me, she must not care. I love her. So I come closer until I loom over her and straddle her bedraggled body. I want to touch her everywhere, but I can’t. I have to move quickly. It is my turn to dance.

I study her face. There’s a trace of alarm in her eyes though her face is still slack. Her lips move, but I can’t make out a sound. Only a faint, warm breath on my cheek. Her eyes are dark, cavernous. She swallows, and the smooth skin on her throat strains against the words she can’t say. I run my finger down her neck. It’s so beautiful. It’s so warm and graceful. I kiss her there, right in the hollow under her jaw. I smell smoke, sweat, and sex on her. There. Right in the hollow of her throat. It’s so full of stories.

I reach into the pocket of my coat and grasp a coil of industrial wire. There it is, pulled taut between us, like all of the things we wish we could say to each other. The middle C of a violincello. A deep vibrato hum in the air. I press it against her throat.

Her eyes try to tell me something. She struggles against the weight of my body as I sit on her chest, my knees pinning down her arms like the translucent wings of a moth fluttering helpless underneath the studied gaze of a dedicated collector.

Her eyes tell me everything.

She’s hungry.

Shhhh, I whisper. I don’t dare disturb our microcosm. There is love in holding on. There is beauty in letting go. Power in taking. Today we triumph. Today we are all three.

She lingers. She strains against the truth. Her lips are the blue of a velvet sky right after the sunset. The last breath of the earth. A tear trails down her face. Her eyelashes darken with moisture. The whites of her eyes are veined with delicate lines. A capillary bursts, and a fleck of red spreads until it traces the black of her iris. She is parchment. She is pen. She writes herself into the story like a blot of ink.

We are at the cusp. We stand at the edge of the world. We breathe in unison. Her last breath will be ours. She emits a choking sound. Her eyelashes quiver and eyes roll back into her head. I let go of the wire. I touch her face, trace my finger around her lips. I lean in. I can smell her breath. It is sour and heavy. My lips touch hers. I kiss her and breathe her in. She moves no more.

She was hungry.

But not as hungry as I.